The biceps are much larger than the brachialis muscles and they attach to your shoulders and forearms. Your biceps actually perform two separate functions. The first function is the one that we are most familiar with. As your bicep contracts and tightens, your forearm is pulled upward and your wrist moves toward your shoulder.
The second function is to rotate your wrists. Go ahead and bend your elbow 90 degrees and face your palm to the floor. Take your opposite hand and place it on top of your bicep. Now, rotate your wrist so that your palm is facing the sealing, and repeat this motion as many times as you want. You should be able to feel your bicep tightening and relaxing as you rotate your wrist.
This second function of the biceps is called supination. When your palms are facing up toward the ceiling, we say that your palms are in the supinated position. This is the position your hands will be in when you do bicep curls. Pronation is the opposite movement: you rotate your wrist until your palm faces the floor and is in the pronated position. This is the position you use to do reverse curls and work your forearms.
Since the supinated position is the one that works the biceps most directly, logic tells us that exercises that put your hand into a supinated position (such as barbell curls) will work the bicep muscles more directly than other exercises. The EZ-curl bar has a less direct effect on the biceps because they are not in the supinated position. In fact, you might notice that the angle of your hands on the EZ-curl bar is close to the angle your hands are in when you do hammer curls – which places significant stress on the forearms.
The two basic functions of the biceps can be incorporated into our workouts with a simple movement while doing dumbbell curls. To accomplish this, begin your dumbbell curls with the palms facing inward toward your body. As you raise the dumbbells, about a third of the way up, rotate your wrist so that your hand is in the supinated position with the palm facing upward. Reverse this rotating movement as you lower your hands back down to your sides. This way, you will have worked the rotating and the curling functions into to your bicep workouts.
If you’re just getting started with working out in a gym, you should probably begin by focusing on the basic bicep exercises. Be sure and do plenty of barbell curls, dumbbell curls and preacher curls. As you add size and mass to your biceps you may begin to focus more on isolation exercises such as concentration curls which will add height to the peak of your biceps.
Even though your biceps won’t need to be trained with as many sets as some of the smaller muscle groups, you’ll add intensity to you bicep routine as you moved from beginner levels to more advanced training. With dedication, hard work, proper dieting, and supplementation, you’ll see your biceps begin to blow up like balloons if you haven’t already.
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